House MD Voice: If It's In His Lungs, It's In His Asshole. Get Me A Biopsy Of His Penis.

House MD is awesome it's like. Did you know self harm isn't always physical. Sometimes it's sabotaging your relationships so you can feel emotional pain when people leave you. Now he's dancing with a boombox

I have seen this so many times recently, I have to say something. I'm not wanting to point out any specific person, and I'm not thinking of anyone particular when I write this. It's mainly just a mindset I see a lot- mostly on tiktok and screenshots of twitter I see, honestly. Less so here. Even so:

Walk with me for a minute. The characters of House M.D. are not bad people.

I know this sounds preachy. And I also know it's kind of meme-y to say House is a bastard or an awful person, or that they're all scumbags or something. I was guilty of this myself when I first joined the fandom in 2023. But to say they're all bad people with no nuance is taking the show and smushing all of the character development and storylines into one dimension. I said in my last analysis post, House M.D. is a show about living in the grey area. There is no black and white; there is no explicit 'good' or 'bad' (and from what I have heard and read about real life medical ethics, there are plenty of situations in the actual medical field that end up like that, too- all grey). In my opinion, the point isn't whether or not House is a sociopath, or a terrible person, or if Wilson acts kind but is secretly awful, or anything else.

To me, the whole point of the show is that all of them can't be put into boxes of 'good' versus 'bad'. They're all just human. People do good things, and people do bad things. People make mistakes. At the end of the day, all of these characters are trying their best to do what they think is the right thing- for themselves, the people they care about, and their patients- in extraordinary circumstances. They lose sleep over it. They feel guilt. They torment themselves over mistakes. They express genuine remorse and regret for hurting people.

House's unending guilt over Amber. The way he admits he feels like it should have been him ("because lonely, misanthropic drug addicts should die in bus crashes, and young do-gooders in love that get dragged out of their apartment in the middle of the night should walk away clean."). Foreman after House Training. Cameron in tears in the chapel after euthanizing Powell. Chase tearing himself apart and being eaten alive by the guilt of purposely taking a life in the episodes after Dibala. Wilson giving part of his liver to his friend/patient to save his life. Cuddy blaming herself over and over in Humpty Dumpty, despite Stacy's reassurance. Thirteen being haunted by euthanizing her brother and wondering if it was really the right thing to do. The way Masters was horrified at her own choices at the end of Last Temptation and turned her back on a career in medicine for good. Adams at the end of Runaways, left alone with the weight of guilt she's been carrying since she was sixteen, knowing she failed Callie. Taub breaking down over Kutner's suicide in Simple Explanation, knowing that just weeks before he'd told Kutner that the two of them weren't friends.

I look at all of those examples– yes, even juxtaposed with the things they've done; House in the Tritter arc, Foreman taking a kid's bone marrow without his parents' permission, Taub cheating on Rachel for years on end, et cetera, et cetera– and I don't see bad people. I see humans. Complicated, messy humans, who have done good things and bad things, but are still humans with inherent worth . I see humans that live in the grey area. I see a reflection of reality and the complicated mess of just existing, and that is one of the things that I love most about this show. Like Hugh Laurie once said... they "made a show that's really about something". And when and if we compress all of that down into black and white, we're really doing ourselves a disservice, to be honest.

So... how about some nuance on tumblr.com?

this image is like modern art to me

how are we holding up, gamers?

in fanfiction we must sometimes ask ourselves not if he would do that but under what conditions would he would do that

POV: you're an underpaid nurse working a rainy overnight shift at princeton plainsboro teaching hospital and you overhear a crazy argument happening in the head of oncology's office (asmr)